The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck – by Mark Manson

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life– by Mark Manson
Date read: 1/17/17. Recommendation: 8/10.

One of the most entertaining writers you'll find. Essentially a deep dive into one my favorite articles from his blog. The core of the book focuses on allocating more time and energy to what matters most (the appropriate allocation of fucks). Instead of over-investing in trivial, superficial things (the inappropriate allocation of fucks). He criticizes our culture's obsession with unrealistically positive expectations and the sense of inadequacy that it provokes. Life is a struggle, we should instead determine what we're willing to struggle for. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My notes:

Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations.

Giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health. It causes you to become overly attached to the superficial and fake, to dedicate your life to chasing a mirage of happiness and satisfaction. The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; it's giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important.

I mean, if you look at your Facebook feed, everybody there is having a fucking grand old time.

Back in Grandpa's day, he would feel like shit and think to himself, "Gee whiz, I sure do feel like a cow turd today. Buy hey, I guess that's just life. Back to shoveling hay." But now? Now if you feel like shit for even five minutes, you're bombarded with 350 images of people totally happy and having amazing fucking lives, and it's impossible to not feel like there's something wrong with you.

By not giving a fuck that you feel bad, you short-circuit the Feedback Loop from Hell; you say to yourself, "I feel like shit, but who gives a fuck?"

The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience.

Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.

I believe that today we're facing a psychological epidemic, one in which people no longer realize it's okay for things to suck sometimes.

When we believe that it's not okay for things to suck sometimes, then we unconsciously start blaming ourselves. We start to feel as though something is inherently wrong with us, which drives us to all sorts of overcompensation.

Life itself is a form of suffering. The rich suffer because of their riches. The poor suffer because of their poverty. People without a family suffer because they have no family. People with a family suffer because of their family.

Emotions evolved for one specific purpose: to help us live and reproduce a little bit better. That's it. They're feedback mechanisms telling us that something is either likely right or wrong for us - nothing more, nothing less.

Negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it's because you're supposed to do something. Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking the proper action.

An obsession and overinvestment in emotion fails us for the simple reason that emotions never last.

Who you are is defined by what you're willing to struggle for. People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who run triathlons and have chiseled abs and can benchpress a small house. People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who fly to the top of it. People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainties of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it.

Numerous professors and educators have noted a lack of emotional resilience and an excess of selfish demands in today's young people.

The flood of extreme information has conditioned us to believe that exceptionalism is the new normal.

The problem is that the pervasiveness of technology and mass marketing is screwing up a lot of people's expectations for themselves.

Once you accept the premise that a life is worthwhile only if it is truly notable and great, then you basically accept the fact that most of the human population (including yourself) sucks and is worthless.

The ticket to emotional health, like that to physical health, comes from eating your veggies - that is, accepting the bland and mundane truths of life: truths such as "Your actions actually don't matter that much in the grand scheme of things" and "The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that's okay."

The stress and anxiety of always feeling inadequate and constantly needing to prove yourself will dissipate. And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations.

The more we choose to accept responsibility in our lives, the more power we will exercise over out lives. Accepting responsibility for our problems is thus the first step to solving them.

We are responsible for experiences that aren't our fault all the time. This is part of life.

Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you. Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you. This is because you always get to choose how you see things, how you react to things, how you value things.

In this way, "knowing yourself" or "finding yourself" can be dangerous. It can cement you into a strict role and saddle you with unnecessary expectations. It can close you off to inner potential and outer opportunities.

I say don't find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that's what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgments and accepting of the differences in others.

When we let go of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves, we free ourselves up to actually act (and fail) and grow.

The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible.

This often means giving up some grandiose ideas about yourself: that you're uniquely intelligent, or spectacularly talented, or intimidatingly attractive, or especially victimized in ways other people could never imagine. This means giving up your sense of entitlement and your belief that you're somehow owed something by this world.

Tools of Titans – Tim Ferriss

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Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers– by Tim Ferriss
Date read: 1/14/17. Recommendation: 9/10.

If you're a fan of the Tim Ferriss podcast, you'll enjoy this book. It's a collection of all his interviews, distilled into their most useful bits of information. Ferriss offers insight into the habits and mental models of top performers across every industry, from fitness to Silicon Valley. This book is a gold mine for thought provoking quotes. A few of my favorite sections feature Naval Ravikant (entrepreneur/investor), Josh Waitzkin (chess prodigy), and Alain de Botton (philosopher). There are sure to be a handful of ideas that will resonate with you and help improve your own mental models. It's a book I revisit with regularity. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Humans only use 10% of their brains? Not quite..."The most complex structure in the entire universe doesn't have just a parking lot waiting for someone to drive in and start building. It's all used all the time, and in complex ways that we don't always understand." -Adam Gazzaley

More than 80% of the world-class performers I've interviewed have some form of daily meditation or mindfulness practice. Both can be thought of as "cultivating a present-state awareness that helps you to be nonreactive."

Take one breath a day..."I tell my students that all they need to commit to is one mindful breath a day. Just one. Breathe in and breathe out mindfully, and your commitment for the day is fulfilled. Everything else is a bonus." -Chade-Meng Tan

Wishing for random people to be happy...During working or school hours, randomly identify two people who walk past you or who are standing or sitting around you. Secretly wish for them to be happy. That is the entire practice. Don't do anything; don't say anything; just think.

It's not what you know, it's what you do consistently.

"'Busy,' to me seems to imply 'out of control.' Like, 'Oh my God, I'm so busy. I don't have any time for this shit!' To me that sounds like a person who's got no control over their life." -Derek Sivers

Lack of time is lack of priorities. If I'm "busy," it is because I've made choices that put me in that position.

"The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right." -Neil Gaiman

"When you can write well, you can think well." -Matt Mullenweg

The world doesn't need your explanation on saying "No."

"Forget purpose. It's okay to be happy without one. The quest for a single purpose has ruined many lives." -James Altucher

"Losers have goals. Winners have systems." -Scott Adams

"If you want something extraordinary, you have two paths: 1) Become the best at one specific thing. 2) Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things...It sounds like generic advice, but you'd be hard-pressed to find any successful person who didn't have about three skills in the top 25%." -Scott Adams

Quick gmail trick: If you append + and a word to the beginning, messages will still get delivered to your inbox. You could use bob+insta@bobsmith.com.

Worst advice: "That you should prioritize growing your social following (Instagram, FB, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube). Grow things that you can fully control that directly affect sales, like your email list. 'Likes' don't pay the bills. Sales do." - Noah Kagan

"Any time I'm telling myself, 'but I'm making so much money,' that's a warning sign that I'm doing the wrong thing." -B.J. Novak

To become "successful," you have to say "yes" to a lot of experiments. To learn what you're best at, or what you're most passionate about, you have to throw a lot against the wall.

"Ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that symbolizes work ethic, or toughness, or some other virtue - but really, it's a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect." -Maria Popova

On advice to your younger self: "'The public is not a threat.' When you realize that we all need each other, and that we can all learn from each other, your stage fright goes away." -Sebastian Junger

"Sit, sit. Walk, walk. Don't wobble." -Zen Mantra

"To me, success is you make your own slot. You have a new slot that didn't exist before." -Kevin Kelly

"When dealing with anyone who's upset, Bill Clinton always asks, 'Has this person slept? Have they eaten? Is somebody else bugging them?" -Alain de Botton

"The very word 'success' has become contaminated by our ideas of someone extraordinary, very rich, etc., and that's really unhelpful...Ultimately, to be properly successful is to be at peace as well." - Alain de Botton

"The more you know what you really want, and where you're really going, the more what everybody else is doing starts to diminish. The moments when your own path is at its most ambiguous, [that's when] the voices of others, the distracting chaos in which we live, the social media static start to loom large and become very threatening." -Alain de Botton

Cal Fussman was allotted 2.5 minutes for an interview with Mikhail Gorbachev. He kept it going 30 minutes by going to the heart with the first question: "What's the best lesson your father ever taught you?"

Cal also suggests asking this question to others more often: "What are some of the choices you've made that made you who you are?"

"In any situation in life, you only have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it." -Naval Ravikant

"The most important trick to be happy is to realize that happiness is a choice that you make and a skill that you develop. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It's just like building muscles." -Naval Ravikant

On why Naval no longer has a quest for immortality: "If you study even the smallest bit of science, you will realize that, for all practical purposes, we are nothing. We're basically monkeys on a small rock orbiting a small, backwards star in a huge galaxy, which is in an absolutely staggeringly gigantic universe, which itself may be part of a gigantic multiverse...There are entire civilizations that we remember now with just one or two words like 'Sumerian' or 'Mayan.' Do you know any Sumerians or Mayans? Do you hold any of them in high regard or esteem? Have they outlived their natural lifespan somehow? No."

"Most people think they can wait around for the big moments to turn it on. But if you don't cultivate 'turning it on' as a way of life in the little moments - and there are hundreds of times more little moments than big - then there's no chance in the big moments." -Josh Waitzkin

"One of the biggest mistakes that I observed in the first year of Jack's life was parents who have unproductive language around weather being good or bad. Whenever it was raining you'd hear [people] say, 'It's bad weather. We can't go out,' or if it wasn't, 'It's good weather. We can go out.' That means that, somehow, we're externally reliant on conditions being perfect in order to be able to go out and have a good time. So, Jack and I never missed a single storm, rain or snow, to go outside and romp in it...We've developed this language around how beautiful it is. Now, whenever it's a rainy day, Jack says, 'Look, Dada, it's such a beautiful rainy day,' and we go out and play in it. I wanted him to have this internal locus of control - to not be reliant on external conditions being just so." -Josh Waitzkin

"The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood..." -Theodore Roosevelt

In the beginning of your career, you spend time to earn money. Once you hit your stride in any capacity, you should spend money to earn time, as the latter is nonrenewable.

"And if you say you're not creative, look at how much you're missing out on just because you've told yourself that. I think that creativity is one of the greatest gifts that we're born with that some people don't cultivate, that they don't realize it could be applied to literally everything in their lives." -Robert Rodriguez

Tribe – Sebastian Junger

Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging – by Sebastian Junger
Date read: 1/9/17. Recommendation: 10/10.

Clear, concise, and thought-provoking read that examines the struggle to find loyalty, belonging, and meaning in modern society. Junger spotlights military veterans and the growing rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, but he also takes a step back to examine the human condition at large. He discusses hardship, raw experiences, social bonds, community, mental health, and what we can learn from tribal societies. Tribe explains that there are three essential needs that must be met if we wish to feel content–the need to feel competent at what we do, the need to feel authentic in our lives, and the need to feel connected to others. Junger considers the effects of their absence and makes a compelling case that we should strive to rediscover and prioritize their importance. 

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My Notes:

Humans don't mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.

It may say something about human nature that a surprising number of Americans - mostly men - wound up joining Indian society rather than staying in their own...Emigration always seemed to go from the civilized to the tribal.

The intensely communal nature of an Indian tribe held an appeal that the material benefits of Western civilization couldn't necessarily compete with.

Genetic adaptations take around 25,000 years to appear in humans, so the enormous changes that came with agriculture in the last 10,000 years have hardly begun to affect our gene pool.

First agriculture, and then industry, changed two fundamental things about the human experience. The accumulation of personal property allowed people to make more and more individualistic choices about their lives, and those choices unavoidably diminished group efforts toward a common good.

A person living in a modern city or a suburb can, for the first time in history, go through an entire day - or an entire life - mostly encounter complete strangers. They can be surrounded by others and yet feel deeply, dangerously alone.

The evidence that this is hard on us is overwhelming. Although happiness is notoriously subjective and difficult to measure, mental illness is not. Numerous cross-cultural studies have shown that modern society - despite its nearly miraculous advances in medicine, science, and technology - is afflicted with some of the highest rates of depression, schizophrenia, poor health, anxiety, and chronic loneliness.

According to a global survey by the World Health Organization, people in wealthy countries suffer depression at as much as eight times the rate they do in poor countries.

Poor people are forced to share their time and resources more than wealthy people are, and as a result they live in closer communities. Inter-reliant poverty comes with its own stresses - and certainly isn't the American ideal - but it's much closer to our evolutionary heritage than affluence...a wealthy person who has never had to rely on help and resources from his community is leading a privileged life that falls ways outside more than a million years of human experience.

Human beings needs three basic things in order to be content: they need to feel competent at what they do; they need to feel authentic in their lives; and they need to feel connected to others.

"The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment...that maximizes consumption at the long-term cost of well-being. In effect, humans have dragged a body with a long hominid history into an overfed, malnourished, sedentary, sunlight-deficient, sleep-deprived, competitive, inequitable, and socially-isolating environment with dire consequences." Journal of Affective Disorders, 2002

Dishonest bankers and welfare or insurance cheats are the modern equivalent of tribe members who quietly steal more than their fair share of meat or other resources.

"Whether...civilization has most promoted or most injured the general happiness of man is a question that may be strongly contested...[both] the most affluent and the most miserable of the human race are to be found in the countries that are called civilized." Thomas Paine, 1795.

Before the war [WW2], projections for psychiatric breakdown in England ran as high as four million people, but as the Blitz progressed, psychiatric hospitals around the country saw admissions go down...Psychiatrists watched in puzzlement as long-standing patients saw their symptoms subside during the period of intense air raids.

Fritz's theory was that modern society has gravely disrupted the social bonds that have always characterized the human experience, and that disasters thrust people back into a more ancient, organic way of relating. Disasters, he proposed, create a "community of sufferers" that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others." It is a kind of fleeting social utopia that, Fritz felt, is enormously gratifying to the average person and downright therapeutic to people suffering from mental illness.

What catastrophes seem to do - sometimes in the span of a few minutes - is turn back the clock on ten thousand years of social evolution. Self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss.

A person's chance of getting chronic PTSD is in great part a function of their experiences before going to war.

A modern soldier returning from combat goes from the kind of close-knit group that humans evolved for, back into a society where most people work outside the home, children are educated by strangers, families are isolated from wider communities and personal gain almost completely eclipses collective good.

Whatever the technological advances of modern society - and they're nearly miraculous - the individualized lifestyles that those technologies seem to spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.

"In the United States we valorize our vets with words and posters and signs, but we don't give them what's really important to Americans, what really sets you apart as someone who is valuable to society - we don't give them jobs. All the praise in the world doesn't mean anything if you're not recognized by society as someone who can contribute valuable labor." -Sharon Abramowitz

There are many costs to modern society, starting with its toll on the global ecosystem and working one's way down to its toll on the human psyche, but the most dangerous loss may be to community.

The public is often accused of being disconnected from its military, but frankly it's disconnected from just about everything. Farming, mineral extraction, gas and oil production, bulk cargo transport, logging, fishing, infrastructure construction - all the industries that keep the nation going are mostly unacknowledged by the people who depend on them the most.

Littering, perfect example of an everyday symbol of disunity in society. When you throw trash on the ground, you apparently don't see yourself as truly belonging to the world that you're walking around in.

One way to determine what is missing in day-to-day American life may be to examine what behaviors spontaneously arise when that life is disrupted.

We live in a society that is basically at war with itself. People speak with incredible contempt about - depending on their views - the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign-born, the president, or the entire US government. It's a level of contempt that's usually reserved for enemies in war-time, except that now it's applied to our fellow citizens.

Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker.

"If you want to make a society work, then you don't keep underscoring the places where you're different - you underscore your shared humanity. I'm appalled by how much people focus on differences." -Rachel Yehuda

Ego Is the Enemy – Ryan Holiday

Ego Is the Enemy – by Ryan Holiday
Date read: 1/5/17. Recommendation: 10/10.

My favorite Ryan Holiday book. If you haven't read any of his work yet, start here. It's a great look into how–in an effort to nurse our ego–we often act in opposition to our best interests. He discusses how to leverage ideas from Stoic philosophy, the pitfalls of self-narrative, and the importance of being a lifelong learner. Numerous life lessons and productive mental models packed into a quick read. Along with Tribe by Sebastian Junger, this is the book I've gifted the most in the past year.

See my notes below or Amazon for details and reviews.

My notes:

"Do not believe that he who seeks to comfort you lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life has much difficulty and sadness and remains far behind yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find those words." -Rainer Maria Rilke

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself - and you are the easiest person to fool." -Richard Feynman

Just one thing keeps ego around - comfort. Pursuing great work - whether it is in sports or art or business - is often terrifying. Ego soothes that fear. It's a salve to that insecurity. Replacing the rational and aware parts of our psyche with bluster and self-absorption, ego tells us what we want to hear, when we want to hear it.

Ego is stolen. Confidence is earned.

We build ourselves up with fantastical stories, we pretend we have it all figured out, we let our star burn bright and hot only to fizzle out, and we have no idea why. These are symptoms of ego, for which humility and reality are the cure.

You must practice seeing yourself with a little distance, cultivating the ability to get out of your own head. Detachment is a sort of natural ego antidote. It's easy to be emotionally invested and infatuated with your own work. Any and every narcissist can do that. What is rare is not raw talent, skill, or even confidence, but humility, diligence, and self-awareness.

Be action and education focused, and forgo validation and status.

Almost universally, the kind of performance we give on social media is positive. It's more "Let me tell you how well things are going. Look how great I am." It's rarely the truth: "I'm scared. I'm struggling. I don't know."

So what is scarce and rare? Silence. The ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation and subsist without its validation. Silence is the respite of the confident and strong.

Doing great work is a struggle.

Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.

"It is impossible to learn that which one thinks one already knows." -Epictetus

The art of taking feedback is such a crucial skill in life, particularly harsh and critical feedback...The ego avoids such feedback at all costs.

On Eleanor Roosevelt: She had purpose. She had direction. She wasn't driven by passion, but by reason.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: Used one word to describe the style of his famous coach [John Wooden]: "dispassionate." As in not passionate. Wooden wasn't about rah-rah speeches or inspiration. He saw those extra emotions as a burden. Instead his philosophy was about being in control and doing your job and never being "passion's slave."

Neither of them [Wooden or Roosevelt] were driven by excitement, nor were they bodies in constant motion. Instead, it took them years to become the person they became known as. It was a process of accumulation.

Passion typically masks a weakness. It's breathlessness and impetuousness and franticness are poor substitutes for discipline, for mastery, for strength and purpose and perseverance.

Passion is seen in those who can tell you in great detail who they intend to become and what their success will be...but they cannot show you their progress. Because their rarely is any.

How can someone be busy and not accomplish anything? Well, that's the passion paradox.

Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself.

When you are just starting out, we can be sure of a few fundamental realities: 1) You're not nearly as good or as important as you think you are; 2) You have an attitude that needs to be readjusted; 3) Most of what you think you know or most of what you learned in books or in school is out of date or wrong.

Attach yourself to people and organizations who are already successful.

"I have observed that those who have accomplished the greatest results are those who 'keep under the body'; are those who never grow excited or lose self-control, but are always calm, self-possessed, patient, and polite." -Booker T. Washington

It doesn't degrade you when others treat you poorly; it degrades them.

It is a timeless fact of life that the up-and-coming must endure the abuses of the entrenched.

The question to ask, when you feel pride, then, is this: What am I missing right now that a more humble person might see? What am I avoiding, or running from, with my bluster, franticness, and embellishments?

It will be a lonely fight to be real, to say "I'm not going to take the edge off." To say, "I am going to be myself, the best version of that self. I am in this for the long game, no matter how brutal it might be."

No matter what you've done up to this point, you better still be a student. If you're not still learning, you're already dying.

It is not enough only to be a student at the beginning. It is a position that one has to assume for life. Learn from everyone and everything.

An amateur is defensive. The professional finds learning (and even, occasionally, being shown up) to be enjoyable; they like being challenged and humbled, and engage in education as an ongoing and endless process.

Narrative is when you look back at an improbable or unlikely path to your success and say: I knew it all along. Instead of: I hoped. I worked. I got some good breaks. Or even: I thought this could happen.

Crafting stories out of past events is a very human impulse. It's also dangerous and untrue. Writing our own narrative leads to arrogance. It turns our life into a story - and turns us into caricatures - while we still have to live it.

A great destiny, Seneca reminds us, is great slavery.

"To know what you like is the beginning of wisdom and of old age." -Robert Louis Stevenson

All of us waste precious life doing things we don't like, to prove ourselves to people we don't respect, to get things we don't want.

You need to know what you don't want and what your choices preclude. Because strategies are often mutually exclusive. One cannot be an opera singer and a teen pop idol at the same time. Life requires those trade-offs, but ego can't allow it.

So why do you do what you do? That's the question you need to answer. Stare at it until you can. Only then will you understand what matters and what doesn't. Only then can you say no, can you opt out of stupid races that don't matter, or even exist.

Sympatheia - a connectedness to the cosmos. The French philosopher Pierre Hadot has referred to it as the "oceanic feeling." A sense of belonging to something larger, of realizing that "human things are an infinitesimal point in the immensity." *cosmic sympathy

That's what we're after here. That's the transcendental experience that makes our petty ego impossible.

Courage, for instance, lies between cowardice one one end and recklessness on the other. Generosity, which we all admire, must stop short of either profligacy and parsimony in order to be of any use. Where the line - this golden mean - is can be difficult to tell, but without finding it, we risk dangerous extremes.

Ego loves this notion, the idea that something is "fair" or not. Psychologists call it narcissistic injury when we take personally totally indifferent and objective events.

Robert Greene: There are two types of time in our lives: dead time, when people are passive and waiting, and alive time, when people are learning and acting and utilizing every second. Every moment of failure, every moment or situation that we did not deliberately choose or control, presents this choice: Alive time. Dead time.

You will be unappreciated. You will be sabotaged. You will experience surprising failures. Your expectations will not be met. You will lose. You will fail. How do you carry on then?

"Ambition means tying your well-being to what other people say or do...Sanity means tying it to your own actions." -Marcus Aurelius

Your potential, the absolute best you're capable of - that's the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.

Attempting to destroy something out of hate or ego often ensures that it will be preserved and disseminated forever.